A Huge Victory for Homeless Veterans

The Veterans Affairs Department is going to provide housing for disabled homeless veterans on the vast property it owns in Los Angeles. On Wednesday, it announced an agreement with plaintiffs in a lawsuit “that restores the West Los Angeles V.A. campus to serving veterans in need,” by housing them there, and by ending the practice of leasing parts of the 387-acre property to outside parties in deals “that do not meet the goal of serving veterans.”

Which raises two obvious questions: Isn’t serving veterans the main — the only — purpose of the V.A.? Why did it have to be sued to do its job?

To which there is one obvious answer: Somewhere along the way, the department lost sight of its mission. The interests of wounded, destitute veterans came into conflict with those of people in Los Angeles who have power and money. The land went to corporate leaseholders, to other, apparently more urgent, commercial and civic needs — to baseball diamonds, theater stages, hotel laundries, rental car and bus storage, even oil wells and a dog park.

The homeless, meanwhile, went to sidewalks and highway underpasses.

This was the way it had been for many years. Los Angeles has long had the largest population of homeless veterans in the country, and also one of the country’s largest V.A. medical centers. But nowhere on that property was there any permanent housing to help veterans leave the streets for good. That this deplorable situation was tolerated for so long reflects the failure of the area’s elected officials. Its powerful congressional delegation and V.A. officials proclaimed their support for the veterans but never managed to do right by them.

Much credit goes to Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert McDonald, barely six months on the job, for recognizing that the Los Angeles debacle could and should be remedied quickly. He listened to the plaintiffs’ lawyer Ron Olson and to Bobby Shriver, the former mayor of Santa Monica, who has pressed this issue for years, and embraced the once radical-sounding idea that the sickest and most troubled veterans need “housing first” to receive services they deserve but cannot get without a roof and a bed.

Credit Mr. McDonald, too, for agreeing to appoint a “homeless czar” to report directly to him, so this urgent mission does not get swallowed by the agency’s dead-end bureaucracy. The ambitious agreement commits the V.A. to having, by mid-February, an “action plan” on ending homelessness in Los Angeles, and to completing, by October, a new master plan for the site.

Mr. McDonald’s predecessor committed the V.A. to an ambitious plan to end veterans’ homelessness by the end of this year. That won’t happen unless the V.A. solves Los Angeles. Mr. McDonald has just given his department a swift kick in the right direction.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: A Huge Victory for Homeless Veterans. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe